Von Gott reden im Land der Tater: Theologische Stimmen der dritten Generation seit der Shoah, and: Parables for Our Time: Rereading New Testament Scholarship after the Holocaust (review)

The books under review—one a monograph on New Testament scholarship after the Holocaust, the other an edited volume of essays on post-Holocaust theology—take us on a journey that begins when the authors position themselves as the representatives of a "third generation" after the Holocaust.¹ This positioning is both retrospective and critical. The vessel on which these theologians sail combines two aspects inherited from previous generations. First, the authors address religious, cultural, or political matters from a liberal perspective that is culturally particular but based in religious practice rather than dogmatic assertions. This is typical of the liberal traditions among modern German Protestants and Catholics. Second, the authors affirm the tradition of thinkers who believe that Christian theology cannot remain unchanged after the culmination of Christian anti-Judaism in an unprecedented genocide. What is new about the present authors is that having come of age at a time when theological responses to the Holocaust had already become routine, they identified a need to reexamine the inherited assumptions of Christian responses to the Holocaust.

It may not be self-evident to American readers that theology should be the locus of a cultural self-examination, but in Germany theologians have often functioned as public intellectuals. At least this has been so since the late 1940s, when German society reoriented itself from a collapsed Volkisch ideology to one able to support reintegration with the West. As many of the authors point out, postwar German society tried to cope with the recent collapse by turning to value systems that allowed it to reestablish a sense of integrity; they needed a mode of dealing with the past, one that was neither thorough nor likely to impede the speedy integration of Germany into the Western alliance. This need was met in part by a swift re-Christianization. The later German Democratic Republic chose a different path, using the antifascist legacy to identify itself with the Soviet victors. Whether, as Daniel Goldhagen has argued, the new public discourse was imposed from above, or, as most of the authors in Von Gott reden im Lande der Täter assume, it was a consciously embraced way to distance oneself from the past, the younger theologians consider the result a web of hypocrisy, pretense, and halfheartedness. Without wishing to discard everything done by their predecessors, these theologians feel the need to reexamine this legacy and to determine for themselves what remains to be done.

Von Gott reden im Lande der Täter covers a wide array of topics and represents a broad spectrum of authors. The contributors, born between 1954 and 1971, include six Catholic and seven Protestant theologians, a Jewish journalist-cum-lay theologian, and three authors of undisclosed religious affiliation whose work is respectively grounded in the study of literature, religion, and philosophy. Quite a few of the authors have studied, or are currently working, in the United States or Canada. The essays are grouped into four chapters: (1) a diagnosis of the "perspectives and blind spots" of previous attempts to reckon with the Holocaust; (2) the shortcomings of established theory and praxis of "Jewish-Christian dialogue"; (3) the problems of the "eye-witnesses and their testimonies"; and (4) "rituals and places of memory." Among the more remarkable contributions to this somewhat uneven volume is coeditor Katharina von Kellenbach's study to a secret memorandum penned by the leadership of the German Protestant Church in 1949 calling for a revision of the judgments issued by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals. The memorandum's language brims with the...